Free A Duke for Christmas by Cynthia Bailey Pratt Page A

please, and he tries so hard, the poor darling.”
    “He doesn’t seem to be suffering too much,” Sophie said, recalling how her brother-in-law paid the closest attention to his young wife, so much so that Maris’s cup was filled almost before it was empty and she never need stand up without his hand at her elbow. Then, too, there was the look in his eyes when he gazed at her, that brilliant light of love that had gone out so soon in Broderick’s eyes.
    As if thinking of him brought him into her sister’s mind as well, Maris suddenly spoke his name. “You never did tell us what happened to Broderick. Only that one letter informing us that he had died suddenly. Were you...with him?”
    Sophie hesitated. Though it would relieve her mind to discuss the facts, she didn’t know if it were right to burden another. If reading an exciting book might alarm an unborn child, what could a tale of sudden death do?
    “Sophie?”
    Of course, Maris did have, and always had, a wonderfully adventurous mind. Though she’d been destined for the quiet life of a gentleman’s daughter, she’d won a grand prize in the Matrimonial Stakes—a wealthy, titled gentleman, the catch of the county. She’d done it by taking risks that would have terrified a professional gamester and, in the end, by laying her cards on the table without fear. Sophie couldn’t imagine that her child would be any less intrepid.
    Sophie leaned her head back against the upholstered headboard. “He took a trip to Sicily to edit his poems. A friend of his, Mr. Knox, accompanied him. Broderick was very fond of appreciating beauty firsthand. A few weeks after they arrived, Broderick fell down a rocky scree. He was picked up dead.”
    “Oh, my ...” Maris groped for her sister’s hand. She pressed it between her own, tears springing to her eyes. “You must have been devastated.”
    “He’d left me long before. All the same, I suppose I was appalled by the waste of his gifts more than anything else. This is a great age for poetry and I believe, truly and even now, I believe he could have been the greatest of them all.”
    “Will you forgive me if I say I don’t see him like that?”
    “Of course,” Sophie said with an inviting smile. “How did you see him?”
    Looking off into the distance, Maris opened her mouth. Glancing suddenly at her sister, she shut it tight, her lips nearly disappearing.
    “No, it’s all right I want to know.”
    “He didn’t seem a very serious man,” Maris said slowly. “Serious about anything. Not even on his wedding day.”
    “Oh, I think he loved me then.”
    “But not later?”
    “No. Not by the time he was dead. Not for a long time before then.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “It’s easy enough. He thought he loved me enough to be married to me. He didn’t love me enough to live with me day after day, doing all the simple, ordinary things that husband and wife do for and with each other.” Sophie was surprised by the sudden stab of pain she felt. Surely there must come a day when she either stopped producing pain or stopped feeling it. Someday, this wincing flesh must be covered by a scar—an ugly remembrance of agony, but no more than a dead region in her heart.
    “I didn’t mean that. I don’t understand how you can be so calm about it. If Kenton ever left me ...” The pink in her cheeks failed completely just imagining it, her hand creeping up to press against her heart.
    “What should I have done? Murdered him? Jumped off Trajan’s Column?”
    “Did you cry?”
    “Oceans. Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Red Sea, Black Sea, bays, lakes, and rivers.” She had no tears now. “I begged him on my knees to stay with me, not to abandon me in a strange country. He only laughed and told me he had fallen in love with someone else. He couldn’t do anything about it, he said. He said that people couldn’t be expected to control their feelings when feelings were, by their nature, the masters of reason and